Lildami returns after two years with his fifth album, “Dummy” (Halley Records, 23). The Catalan urban scene is once again in luck, because the one in Terrassa is at the peak of his career, as shown in the twelve pieces that make up his new reference, in which we notice him freer than ever.
Much of this is to blame for the detachment of prejudices that Damià has had, daring to put aside the purest sounds of rap and trap, to fully delve into any type of genre. He dares to play from bases more typical of pop to bachata in “If you’re not with me”without forgetting his rapper essence, as in “Let this not end”. And, although he gets up to rhythms that are out of his comfort zone, he manages to stick his bars in all of them, showing that he is much more of a chameleon than one could intuit. He does all of this through different themes, keeping his vindictive spirit intact, daring to also speak of his own internal demons, but having (lack of) love as its central core.
And to shape several of his songs, he has joined a small, but varied, list of Catalan artists. Mr. Chen, with whom he already has a long list of collaborations and co-produces many of the songs on the album, unites fully on two songs. First “Talldam”, in which the rapper tells us everything he has had to suffer to get to where he has arrived; and the second, “whistle” together with Flora, it is a much more melodic and calm piece in which they give voice to nature and environmentalism, daring to leave aside the most conventional themes. And he decides to invite the young Triquell to join in his most vindictive topic, “4 gats”in which Dami’s bars are our most euphoric part and Cesc’s sweet voice leads us directly to our most emotional part, managing to become one of the jewels of the job.
But we couldn’t do this review without mentioning what is already one of the Catalan pop hits in recent years, “Supermarket”. Here Lildami shows that she can jump to a more mainstream sound without any problem, both in the most frenetic part of her, and in that slow ukulele chorus, in which the voice of the man from Egar shines more than ever. A song that has managed to be the most radioed in Catalonia in 2022 and that accumulates almost three million views on digital platforms, its greatest success to date.
This new evolution of Lildami It places him – if he wasn’t already – as the great referent of the Catalan urban scene, both with respect to gender and language. As he says in his last track, “Crash Test Dami”Perhaps he is not the best at doing what he does, but he is the first and he is managing to open many paths within the panorama. All this puts him at a new starting point, in which he only generates great expectations for us to see what his next step will be.